


I'll Follow the Sun

by thundercrackfic



Series: Ineffably Soft [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: After Armageddidn't, Anxious Crowley (Good Omens), Asexual Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Astronomy, Comforting Aziraphale (Good Omens), Fluff, Industrial-grade softness, M/M, Other, Perseids, Post-Canon, Sharing a Body, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 01:56:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21291746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thundercrackfic/pseuds/thundercrackfic
Summary: After Armageddon doesn't happen, an angel tries to help a demon find peace in a sky he once helped to create.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Ineffably Soft [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1534874
Comments: 27
Kudos: 142





	I'll Follow the Sun

Aziraphale was bored, a state simultaneously unusual and unpleasant. Unusual, because typically he could lose himself in any book; but Crowley’s constant fidgeting and needling, much worse than typical, was driving him to distraction. Unpleasant, because with the would-be Armageddon stopped, the angel and demon ought to be enjoying a respite from pressures from above and below. Although Aziraphale was ready to enjoy a bit of a break, Crowley worried and fretted and could not rest unless he became obnoxiously drunk.

“Let’s take a holiday,” Aziraphale tried one night, as Crowley worked the cork out of a third bottle of wine with the hyperfocus of someone pretending he wasn’t drunk yet. “No one’s watching us. We could go off together, see some places we’ve never seen. I’d love to visit Oaxaca, I hear they do scrumptious things with chocolate and chili.”

Crowley twitched. He had his dark glasses on, and Aziraphale couldn’t read him. “Can’t,” Crowley said. “Got a temptation to do.”

“We’ll go after.”

“Got another temptation.”

“Crowley. Be serious. Is anybody actually issuing orders to you anymore?”

Crowley writhed under the question, downing most of the glass he’d finally managed to pour. “Not as such. But they’re waiting. They’re expecting. They’re _judging_.” He sprang up from the settee, nervously running his fingers along the spines of books.

Aziraphale didn’t push. After six thousand years he knew when Crowley was struggling. Whatever was going on, reasoning with him wouldn’t fix it, Aziraphale knew.

But it was vexing. In the aftermath of the unfulfilled Armageddon, Aziraphale felt freer than he ever had before. He’d slipped his leash. He could indulge in every Earthly delight without guilt. He could fraternize (as Upstairs put it) with Crowley openly. That Crowley didn’t feel as free was terribly frustrating.

Like Crowley, Aziraphale expected that this peaceful time would end eventually. Unlike Crowley, Aziraphale’s sense of impending doom made him want to indulge himself all the more, while it lasted.

However, Aziraphale was nothing if not patient. He would solve the problem, he just needed to find a way through. In the meantime, he kept company with the demon, pouring more wine until they were both inebriated enough not to care a whit for the future.

  


* * *

  


There were new restaurants, new books, new cocktails. Crowley disappeared for days or weeks from time to time, creating mischief. Aziraphale tidied his bookshop, waited for Crowley to return, and read. Once or twice a week, he asked Crowley to take him driving. Nowhere in particular, just down roads they hadn’t passed before. He kept an Ordnance Survey map in his lap the whole time, noting peaks and valleys surreptitiously as Crowley tore through country roads.

  


* * *

  


The late summer was hot. Afternoons in Aziraphale’s bookshop often found Crowley supine on the sofa in the back office, limbs akimbo, basking in a sunbeam as the irritable angel scowled at customers who’d only come in seeking air conditioning.

“Better they want you for your AC than that they want to buy your books, am I right, angel?” Crowley asked when Aziraphale complained to him later. Aziraphale just sniffed and picked up the _Guardian_. He brightened when he read one news item. He had had a perfect idea.

* * *

  


After noon on 12 August, Aziraphale closed up shop early, packed a picnic basket, gathered his Ordnance Survey maps, and woke Crowley. “Let’s go driving and have a picnic for tea,” he said. “I know just the spot.”

“Or we could just stay here and get sloshed,” Crowley said.

“Come now, Crowley, you’ve hardly left the shop for a week. Let’s get away from all of this – _humanity_ – for a little while,” Aziraphale said, waving an arm at London.

“Eeuuh,” Crowley groaned. But he slithered off the sofa and followed Aziraphale out the door.

  


* * *

  


It was a brilliant late-summer afternoon with not a cloud in the sky; Aziraphale had seen to that with a few little miracles, vanishing any clouds that dared appear. He navigated Crowley to the south and west of London, toward the coast. Urban blight gave way to rolling green hills, some tending to brown. Soon they were approaching South Downs National Park, and parked the Bentley along a narrow farm road next to a stile with an understated sign pointing to a trail.

They stepped out of the car. Crowley raised his eyebrows over his sunglasses at Aziraphale, a wordless question. “Just a bit of a walk now,” Aziraphale said. “A little constitutional always adds to the appetite.”

Crowley’s brows nudged slightly higher. Aziraphale saw the demon looking about at the open, green landscape and pretending not to enjoy it. But the angel knew him well enough to know he liked what he saw.

Crowley took the heavy picnic basket from Aziraphale. “Lead on, angel,” he said, flashing a look with his yellow eyes over his glasses. Aziraphale just beamed beatifically at him and stepped over the stile, lifting his trouser legs to keep them from touching anything that might besmirch them.

It wasn’t a long walk but it was straight uphill on uneven ground, so they didn’t look around much as they climbed. At length they reached the spot Aziraphale had scouted out: a natural hollow in a grassy slope, a brook trickling nearby. “Here we are, then,” Aziraphale said, and turned back to look the way they’d come.

The hollow had a stunning view. It faced west and south and the sea was distantly visible to the left. To the right was hill after rolling hill, alternating from the bright greens and browns of pastureland to the darker greens of woods. The Sun was above and in front of them, casting its golden light over everything. There was a stiff onshore wind but the hollow mostly sheltered them from it, so there were just whorls of breeze entering the hollow and ruffling their hair.

Crowley tried not to look pleased, but failed. “Not bad,” he allowed, and he helped Aziraphale lay down the tartan wool blanket and their tea.

Aziraphale was a picnic artist. He’d brought scotch eggs and chicken-and-chutney sandwiches and a selection of cheeses and fruit pastes and thick nutty crackers and pickled vegetables and a thermos for tea and three different wines for after. Aziraphale ate most of it but Crowley indulged in tastes here and there as they talked easily about past meals over six thousand years.

After a last morsel of cheese Crowley melted onto the blanket, closing his eyes and tipping off his glasses. So close to the ground he was entirely out of the breeze and bathed full-on in the afternoon sunlight. He was asleep almost instantly. Aziraphale tidied up the picnic, poured another glass of wine, and reclined to read one of the books he’d brought.

So they stayed for the remainder of the afternoon, as the Sun sank. Finishing his book, Aziraphale looked over at Crowley and felt warm. Crowley was usually so tightly wound, so angular, so_ pointy_. Now, sleeping in the sunlight on a plaid blanket on a grassy slope, he looked languid, relaxed, less spiky, more like a waterfall than an icicle. His face was smooth and peaceful, without shadows, just sunlight over all of him. Aziraphale felt impossibly fond.

Crowley was asleep; there were few humans for miles around; there were no threats at the moment from Heaven or Hell. Blissfully, Aziraphale dropped some of the walls around his angelic soul, letting his wings manifest and his aura extend outward into the protected lands of the national park.

It was rapturous. Aziraphale stood up, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. His nose detected a little scent of the sea but mostly the grassy, earthy odors of the land around him. Extending himself, he could feel myriad insects and worms and spiders and moles and voles burrowing in the ground below, and flew with more insects and swifts and even a kestrel in the sky above. Closer by, the breeze softly ruffled the curls on his head and the feathers on his wings. He faced the Sun and though his eyes were closed he felt suffused with its glow.

He folded his hands and thought a wordless prayer of gratitude, for the beauty of the world and everything in it. For the fact that it had not, after all, ended. Aziraphale never knew if God listened to his prayers but he sent them all the same, and he felt at peace.

The air began to chill. The Sun reached the horizon. Aziraphale heard Crowley stir. With his aura extended, he felt the demon shifting from the low hum of sleep to the rumble and static of wakefulness.

Crowley opened his eyes, and furrowed his brow as he saw his companion standing beside him, wings half-open. “Aziraphale, what are you doing?”

Aziraphale smiled. “There’s so much _pressure_ in London,” he said. “I wanted a little space to stretch out. I highly recommend it. It’s so lovely here.”

Crowley reached for his sunglasses and Aziraphale frowned automatically. Crowley’s hand stopped. Instead of putting on the glasses he looked away from Aziraphale and sat up. “Sun’s setting. Should we be going, then?”

“No,” Aziraphale said. “We need to stay here a bit longer. There’s something I’d like you to see.”

“And what’s that?”

Aziraphale pursed his lips, happy. “It’s a surprise!” he said.

“Aw, angel, you know I hate surprises,” Crowley whined.

“Trust me, you’ll love this one,” Aziraphale said. “Now let’s watch the sunset.”

The sunset was spectacular, made especially ruddy by a distant forest fire. Aziraphale had brought cocoa, spiced with a bit of roasted chili powder; he thought again of visiting Oaxaca some day.

As the Sun’s light dimmed, the two-day-old Moon glowed more and more above it, a brilliant golden crescent near the horizon, like a demon’s horns. “Nice touch,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale smiled.

“That’s just the appetizer. There’s more.” As the Moon followed the Sun and true darkness fell, Crowley looked askance at Aziraphale but the angel just said, “We’re not done yet. Your surprise comes after full dark.”

“You intrigue me, angel.”

Aziraphale wiggled where he sat on the blanket, and his wings fluffed. “I know,” he said, giddy. Crowley barked out a laugh.

The air was chilly now, the breeze carrying the cold of the Channel with it. Aziraphale fished a second wool blanket out of the bottomless picnic basket, along with a bottle of 40-year-old port. Crowley miracled their wine glasses clean, and Aziraphale poured. He reclined on his elbow and looked overhead. He could already see a few planets and several of the brightest stars, the Summer Triangle of Altair, Vega, and Deneb to the east, and Arcturus closer to the recently-set Sun. As his eyes adjusted, more stars came in to view. He saw Crowley look up, frown, and look down to take a large swig of port. Aziraphale kept his eyes on the sky.

_There._ He saw it. Now it was fully dark, he could see. _There_. Another bright streak, north to south. And then, in his peripheral vision, two more. Aziraphale grinned. “Have you not yet discovered why I brought you here this night, Crowley?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Crowley said, glowering into his wine glass, his eyes averted from the sky.

“Think of the date. What happens in the sky on August 12, every year?”

Crowley frowned. Then he closed his eyes and sighed. “It’s the Perseids,” he said. Quietly, he added, “I made this one. It’s a corker. She chided me for getting carried away.”

Aziraphale laughed. “And it’s wonderful. The stars are shooting everywhere now.”

“Angel,” Crowley said, grinding the word through his teeth. He fixed his gaze on Aziraphale, his slitted eyes barely visible in the starlight. “_I can’t see them_. I haven’t seen them since – since – “

“I know,” Aziraphale said. “But tonight, you can.”

“How?” Crowley asked, desperately.

Aziraphale’s smile widened. He downed the last of his port, set the glass aside, and reached for Crowley’s hand. “Like this,” he said, enclosing Crowley’s hand in his.

Touching Crowley, he felt the demon’s shock at the contact, then a fierce hunger. Crowley’s soul poured through the connection between them, until he could look out of Aziraphale’s eyes. The angel was pushed aside, but not entirely, feeling both the demon’s body and his own.

Together in both bodies, separately but as one, Aziraphale’s body lay back on the picnic blanket, the better to let his eyes take in the wide sky. Crowley’s corporation reached for the second blanket, covering them both, then reclined on an elbow, looking at Aziraphale’s body. They both gazed through Aziraphale’s eyes at the heavens above.

Starved for starlight, Crowley drank it all in. He greeted Deneb straight overhead, and Altair and Vega nearby. These stars Crowley had been able to see with his snake eyes, but it had been millennia since he’d seen their companion stars composing the swan and the eagle, Heracles and the dragon, Cassiopeia on the rocks and Perseus and the Pegasus he rode, and all the stars within them. Through Aziraphale’s sharp, farsighted eyes he could even see the smudge of the Andromeda galaxy within Pegasus’ hind leg, and the soft smoky band of the Milky Way to the south.

All the while, Perseids streaked across the sky, a few times a minute, usually colorless but occasionally chromatic, their trails sparkling. They were delightfully random. There would be quiet, then a bright streak, a dim one, a pause, a cluster, each one calling out a different part of the sky. Aziraphale could feel Crowley’s yearning for the stars he hadn’t seen since before he Fell.

Aziraphale retreated from his corporation into Crowley’s and gazed at his own face through serpent eyes. From these eyes he couldn’t see the stars, could hardly see anything in the dark, unless Crowley moved the angel’s body. But he could see the warmth radiating out of his own body from the demon’s soul.

There is another thing that snake eyes can’t do, but an angel’s can. As Aziraphale watched from Crowley’s body, his own eyes welled up and overflowed with tears as Crowley gazed upon the stars and shower of meteors.

Aziraphale suddenly felt a burst of intense melancholy. Muddled as they were, it took a moment for the angel to realize that the emotion originated with Crowley. “Dearest,” he said with Crowley’s mouth, “What’s the matter?”

Crowley-in-Aziraphale tried to talk, failed, swallowed, licked his lips, tried again. “They’re Falling,” he said of the Perseids.

Aziraphale felt that his heart would burst. He wasn’t sure what to say. He knew that Crowley knew that the Perseids were only so many dust motes. They weren’t the souls of Falling angels, bright at the start and burnt to a crisp. He knew it was just a metaphor, but Crowley was hurting so much, loving their brightness and watching them wink out. Loving them, even though demons were not supposed to be able to love. Aziraphale felt fierce pride that his own demon (for Crowley was his) was so special, able to do what no other demon could.

Aziraphale pushed his pride and his love at Crowley, bolstering him, as Crowley reunited with the stars that, against all odds, he could still love.

They were caught out of time as the heavens wheeled above them. Altair set and Capella rose, and then the bright twins of Castor and Pollux and warrior Orion with his red shoulder Betelgeuse and blue knee Rigel, and still Perseid meteors streaked across the sky as the demon watched out of the angel’s eyes and the angel watched the demon out of the demon’s eyes.

Mercury clearing the horizon was like Reveille for both of them, rousing them from their thrall. The dimmer stars faded, and the brightening sky clouded the view of the Perseid meteors. Crowley-in-Aziraphale, enraptured for hours, collapsed on the blanket, and Aziraphale-in-Crowley felt spent, but happy. In Crowley’s body, Aziraphale squeezed his own hand. “Darling. The Sun is rising.”

Crowley-in-Aziraphale closed his eyes. “So it is.”

“Shall we—“

“All right.”

With a feeling of both happiness and regret, Aziraphale flowed back into his own corporation. His eyes felt puffy and wet. He pulled his handkerchief out of his waistcoat pocket and dabbed at their corners.

Crowley looked down. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“There’s no need to thank me,” Aziraphale said, squeezing his hand. “I wish I had thought of this sooner.” His wings were still out, but Crowley’s were not. Suddenly self-conscious, Aziraphale reestablished his walls, and willed his wings away.

Something in the air had changed. Crowley looked sad, and tired. “Let’s go home, angel.”

“All right,” Aziraphale said, and set about packing up and departing as fast as possible. He worked hard to keep his aspect bright, hiding his sudden melancholy. He reminded himself of the happiness Crowley had been able to experience, for a few hours, anyway. Aziraphale told himself that he’d be able to do better, make the happy times last longer, in the future. Aziraphale wasn’t the most powerful angel but he was stubborn as an ox. He knew he loved Crowley more than anything else in Creation and now that Armageddon had been averted and they were both, for the time being, free from interference, Aziraphale wouldn’t desist from giving the demon the peace and love that Crowley would never admit he craved.

They packed up, and Crowley lifted the basket. Aziraphale led the way downhill.

After a minute or two of walking down the hill, Crowley slipped his hand into Aziraphale’s, and the angel felt like he might burst with love.

  


* * *

  


Back on the road, Aziraphale gazed out the window, his attention inward. He wanted to fix the memory of the night under the stars in his mind for all time. Thinking about the stars and constellations, he remarked, “Isn’t it odd that the stars have Arabic names and the constellations are named for Greek and Roman gods? With the Europeans dominating science and arts for centuries, you would think they would have Christianized the sky.”

Crowley _cackled_. “That’s one of mine,” he said.

“What?”

“Men who think themselves reasonable are such easy marks. Anytime a self-important natural philosopher tried to promote his idea for Christian constellations, all I had to do was whisper in the ear of another one, and they’d fight about their systems so much that neither ever won.”

“Crowley.”

“Got several commendations for that, over the years.” Excited, Crowley pressed his foot a little harder on the accelerator, and Aziraphale gripped the door handle. “They finally gave up on the constellations. Pagan gods are baked in to astronomy. Everyone has to learn about gods other than Her to know the sky. That’s a win for Hell, right there.”

“You’re a rascal,” Aziraphaile said, admiringly.

“It wasn’t any fun anymore for a while, but recently I’ve been fomenting discord over what to call Pluto. That fight’s got legs.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Perseids are a fabulous meteor shower that occurs every year from August 11 to 13 as Earth passes through the orbital path of comet Swift-Tuttle. Not every year is a great Perseids year. The dust trail is clumpy, and a full Moon will wash things out. For the purpose of this fic I gave our protagonists the best possible circumstances: a clear sky, a dark location, and a nearly new Moon. Under those circumstances, the Perseids are pretty amazing.
> 
> Also, it doesn't matter what a few English-speaking nerds call Pluto. Pluto is and always will be what it was before humans were around. It's an amazing world with nitrogen glaciers and bladed terrain made of carbon monoxide and five moons and a churning heart-shaped nitrogen-filled impact basin. All that stuff is way more interesting than any stupid nomenclature debate.


End file.
